Dear Lifehacker, As a researcher, I have to read endless reports and papers (Word and PDF). I don’t like to read long reports on the screen, and I also tend to annotate questions/comments as I read, either at work or during a commute (where I don’t have a laptop with me). At work with Windows, it is easy to read/comment word documents, and PDF-Xchange viewer does an OK (but not great) job at letting me annotate/comment PDF articles. But both become a pain at home where I have Linux and have to rely on Wine to run Office and so on.
So, is there any tablet out there (or in a near feature) or any eBook device that will allow for commenting/annotating articles with a “stylus” or keyboard? Or any other suggestion to reduce printouts and make the addition of comments and the like a better experience? Cheers,
Luis
Dear Luis,
I don’t personally claim any particular expertise when it comes to annotation apps for tablets, and many of the annotation apps we’ve featured in the past are more focused on commenting pictures than text and working with web sites. So as far as that part of the question is concerned, I’ll throw it wide open to the readers and ask for any recommendations. Given its current dominance in the space, the iPad might seem an obvious candidate, but its lack of a readily available file system can make it fiddly if you want to work with lots of documents in an offline environment.
If you’re not finding PDF-Xchange to your taste, we’re big fans around here of Nitro PDF Reader, which also includes annotation capabilities for PDF documents. It’s entirely free, it’s very slim software, and it’s definitely worth a look if you regularly want to work with PDF files.
Cheers
Lifehacker
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